---
title:  Keeping a Disk Store Synchronized with the Cache
---

<!--
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
-->

<a id="syncing_offline_disk_store__section_7D01550D750E48289EFBA9BBDB5A334E"></a>
You can take several actions to optimize disk store use and data loading at startup.

## <a id="syncing_offline_disk_store__section_7B95B20F07BD40699CDB7F3D6A93B905" class="no-quick-link"></a>Change Region Configuration

When your disk store is offline, you can keep the configuration for its regions up-to-date with your `cache.xml` and API settings. The disk store retains region capacity and load settings, including entry map settings (initial capacity, concurrency level, load factor), LRU eviction settings, and the statistics enabled boolean. If the configurations do not match at startup, the `cache.xml` and API override any disk store settings and the disk store is automatically updated to match. So you do not need to modify your disk store to keep your cache configuration and disk store synchronized, but you will save startup time and memory if you do.

For example, to change the initial capacity of the disk store:

``` pre
gfsh>alter disk-store --name=myDiskStoreName --region=partitioned_region 
--disk-dirs=/firstDiskStoreDir,/secondDiskStoreDir,/thirdDiskStoreDir 
--initialCapacity=20
```

To list all modifiable settings and their current values for a region, run the command with no actions specified:

``` pre
gfsh>alter disk-store --name=myDiskStoreName --region=partitioned_region
--disk-dirs=/firstDiskStoreDir,/secondDiskStoreDir,/thirdDiskStoreDir  
```

## <a id="syncing_offline_disk_store__section_0CA17ED106394686A1A5B30601758DA6" class="no-quick-link"></a>Take a Region Out of Your Cache Configuration and Disk Store

You might remove a region from your application if you decide to rename it or to split its data into two entirely different regions. Any significant data restructuring can cause you to retire some data regions.

This applies to the removal of regions while the disk store is offline. Regions you destroy through API calls or by `gfsh` are automatically removed from the disk store of online members.

In your application development, when you discontinue use of a persistent region, remove the region from the member’s disk store as well.

**Note:**
Perform the following operations with caution. You are permanently removing data.

You can remove the region from the disk store in one of two ways:

-   Delete the entire set of disk store files. Your member will initialize with an empty set of files the next time you and start it. Exercise caution when removing the files from the file system, as more than one region can be specified to use the same disk store directories.
-   Selectively remove the discontinued region from the disk store with a command such as:

    ``` pre
    gfsh>alter disk-store --name=myDiskStoreName --region=partitioned_region
    --disk-dirs=/firstDiskStoreDir,/secondDiskStoreDir,/thirdDiskStoreDir --remove
    ```

To guard against unintended data loss, Geode maintains the region in the disk store until you manually remove it. Regions in the disk stores that are not associated with any region in your application are still loaded into temporary regions in memory and kept there for the life of the member. The system has no way of detecting whether the cache region will be created by your API at some point, so it keeps the temporary region loaded and available.
